Black Beauties vs. Coated Ernie Balls

I have wondered what all the talk about coatedstrings was about. The only coated strings I have tried in the past were black flat wound. They were cool, but I have never seen another set. That was decades ago.

I recently purchased a set of Ernie Ball’s coated strings for $29.99 at GC and installed them on my moded Peavey Fury,

They were very bright. Too bright for the first day,and then they smoothed out and sounded more like good old Ernie Balls. I thought they would sound more dull than uncoated round wound???

With in a few weeks, I purchased black hardwarefor my Fury. I just had to have some Black Beauties.so, I bought a set of DR EXTRA LIFE hand madecoated Black Beauties at GC for $45.99. The samesize as the coated Ernie Balls. (105 to 45)

The Black beauties sounded dull compared to the Ernie Balls. That was I had expected from coated strings.

Thanks for sharing that. I would be interested in hearing how they are once you have had the chance to get them worked out. I rarely hear of anyone using those strings. I just changed the strings on my Alvarez AEB5 from rounds to D' Addario flatwounds and the sound diff was obviously different. I don't know why I waited so long to switch to them.

I've had 3 sets of DR coated strings, the Neons to be specific. All three sets sounded dead and could not cut through a mix at all with my 75RI Jazz. I emailed DR after the first set and they were kind enough to send me the other two sets but I had the same problem. Can't speak for the Ernie Balls but if you're feeling experimental in trying other coated strings I highly recommend Elixir, they're great fairly bright strings and they last forever. Bit on the pricey side though.